Stealing kit kat leads to rape conviction

LONDON, Aug 24: Stealing a Kit Kat chocolate bar from a shop has landed an Englishman in jail for a lengthy period after a DNA test showed he had committed a rape more than two years earlier.

Confronted with the evidence at Gloucester crown court on Tuesday, Jason Chandler, 26, changed his plea to guilty and was told by the judge he faced a long prison term.

Chandler stole the chocolate at a shop near his home in Weston-super-mare, became involved in a scuffle and was arrested for a drunken driving offence last year.

A DNA test revealed that chandler had assaulted a 19-year-old woman walking through Gloucester City Centre some 60 miles (100 kilometres) away, dragging her into a car and raping her in September 1997.

Remanding Chandler in custody for pre-sentence reports, Judge Gabriel Hutton told him that he could expect a long term in prison.

"It is a happy coincidence for the public that this came about, but it was not happy for the defendant. This demonstrates how increasingly powerful the use of DNA can be in the fight against crime," he said.

The case came to light in a report by Gloucestershire chief constable Tony Butler, published on Tuesday. (DPA)

UN peacekeeping efforts doomed to fail without massive ravamp

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 24: The United Nations’ peacekeeping efforts around the world will meet with more failures if it does not consider an overhaul of the operations, a report by an international panel says.

The panel, appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, has held the Security Council and the member states responsible for the past failures, attributing it to inconsistent policies and underfunded mandates.

"Most failures occurred because the Security Council and the member states crafted and supported "ambiguous, inconsistent and under-funded mandates and then stood back and watched as they failed....As the credibility of the UN underwent its severest tests," the report says.

The panel says that the UN needed to "to rethink the historically prevailing view of peacekeeping as a temporary aberration rather than a core function of the UN."

Calling on member states to "accept that primary responsibility for reform lies with them," the report says that effective and quick deployment of troops, adequate resources and strengthening of the planning staff are necessary to ensure the success of the peace missions.

The ten-member panel of experts, chaired by former Algerian Foreign Minister Lakhdar Brahimi, was appointed following highly critical reports on the performance of the UN peace missions in the Rwanda genocide in 1994 and the 1995 massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.

The report will be considered by the General Assembly’s two-day millennium summit beginning on September six.

It, however, said that without renewed commitment on the part of member states, "significant institutional change and increased financial support, the UN will not be capable of executing the critical peacekeeping and peace-building tasks ....In coming months and years."

Brahmi told reporters that nobody wanted to repeat the bitter experience of the past few years and termed as "frankly scandalous" that the UN should lack in resources and personnel to carry out its main function of ensuring global peace and security.

Secretary General Kofi Annan, endorsing the proposals of the report, urged all member states to consider "approving and supporting the implementation of those recommendations and designated Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frichette to oversee the preparation of an implementation plan. (PTI)

Butterflies matched Nabokov’s passion for language

NEW YORK, Aug 24: His novels, memoirs and poetry are as delicate and intricate as a butterfly’s wings, so it should come as no surprise that Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, the author of "lolita," was an avid lepidopterist.

A love of nature is evident throughout Nabokov’s novels, particularly those with Russian emigres reminiscing about their homeland such as "mary" or in the memoir "speak, memory," and the love of butterflies works its way into his writing through both outright and subtle references.

This passion is charted in the recently published "Nabokov’s butterflies" (beacon press) and it becomes apparent that Nabokov, a Russian-born writer who caught his first butterfly at age 7, was not just a casual observer of butterflies.

It was a passion nursed from an early age by a family with a great appreciation for nature and one that continued even as Nabokov’s literary career blossomed.

His mother "was an ardent entomologist. She was truly impassioned (about the study of insects) and she transmitted a lot of that to Vladimir in the summers in the middle of an immense natural preserve, which was the country estate," Nabokov’s son Dmitri told Reuters in an interview.

Vladimir Nabokov himself wrote in "speak, memory": "Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration."

As a child he escaped through his window with net and specimen jar as an adult, he drew thousands of butterflies for his scientific papers and his catalogue of european butterflies. According to "Nabokov’s butterflies," he contributed to the scientific study of butterflies by measuring patterns of scales by counting, numbering, and quantitatively comparing rows. This mapping of butterfly wings helped the famed writer distinguish between butterfly colonies and track their evolution.

‘Splendid but nonexistent butterflies’

But not all of Nabokov’s butterfly drawings were purely scientific. "For me and for mother and for a few select people he would dedicate his books and he would draw splendid, plausible, but nonexistent butterflies," said Dmitri Nabokov, who served as translator for "Nabokov’s butterflies."

Forced to flee Russia after the 1917 revolution, Nabokov was educated at England’s Cambridge University and lived in Berlin, where he met his wife vera and wrote novels in Russian. They eventually moved to france and, in 1940, the United States.

A year after their arrival, the Nabokovs undertook their first butterfly-hunting trip across the country.

"The first trip was with a student of my father’s, a very nice American lady who lived in New York, in her brand new pontiac, which we called poinka," Dmitri recalled. "It was before my mother and I learned to drive."

In stacy Schiff’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography "Vera (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov)," the competition between husband and wife to net butterflies is characterised as a heated one. But that was not so, recalled Dmitri, saying Schiff must have missed some nuances of the rapport between his parents.

He said the competition was more of a "friendly joint participation in the hunt. She loved going walking with him and helping him find butterflies. She learned quiet a bit from him, as did I. It was a joyous competitiveness."

Dmitri, born in Berlin in 1934, recalled that his father took him on walks in parks there and in the mountains of France, where he taught his son about butterflies and an appreciation for nature. "I was very interested and he taught me the rudiments. I am not a lepidopterist, but I think the rudiments are fascinating and they certainly have helped me very much, especially with the translating."

Dmitri has translated not only this latest work about Nabokov and his butterflies but also those of his father’s novels, poems and plays that were written in Russian.

While he was not as fully involved with butterfly collecting as his father, he recalled the pleasure of seeing butterfly specimens that had been donated by the Harvard museum to a museum devoted to Nabokov in St Petersburg, Russia.

‘Immensely touching’

He recalled visiting the museum and seeing cases containing the specimens that credited two butterfly nets, those of "V. and D Nabokov, which I found immensely touching."

It was in the mountains of Switzerland, where the writer and his wife spent their final years, that Dmitri and his father enjoyed a conversation near the site of an eddy of butterflies.

"It was one of those frank dialogues which usually appear only in only bad novels. He opened up to me — he was always open to me, but particularly on that occasion — he said he truly achieved what he always wanted in life and that his heart was like an undeveloped film of which he had managed to develop almost all and much else," the son said.

He said his father’s butterfly studies have become more widely appreciated. "When he became acting curator of lepidopterology in Harvard, he had a laboratory in which he had implements and collections to work with and develop his theories about classification by genitalia and by the arrangement of scales on certain blues and other butterflies," he said.

"For a while that was ignored by the butterfly world as the whim of ... A great writer’s hobby. (but now) he has been recognised as a true innovator. There have been books written about his discoveries ... Which confirm some of them so that the entomologists of today are catching, for example, new species in the amazon and naming these finds after Nabokov’s fictional characters."

So, in a playful twist of fate that could only occur in a Nabokov novel, characters from his work — "Pnin," "Ada or ardor: A family chronicle" and "pale fire" — appear in the real world of zoology.

Nabokov, who closely tracked colour patterns of butterfly wings, must have been aware of the tenet that coloration served as protection so butterflies could evade prey, but he questioned whether the colours did not also serve a higher purpose.

According to Dmitri, Vladimir Nabokov believed the colourful wings of a butterfly had greater significance: "Nature was preparing it for the eye of man and the joy of man, which is perhaps vindicated by the fact that butterflies now have become loved so much on many levels." (REUTERS)

Submarine victims’ relatives to pay tribute at disaster site

MOSCOW, Aug 24: Scores of grieving relatives of the sailors who died on a sunken nuclear submarine were to lay flowers today on the cold gray waters where the ship went down after a shattering explosion.

About 150 relatives were expected to be on a boat heading out into the Barents Sea, bearing flowers including a wreath from President Vladimir Putin, news reports said.

Many of the 118 dead sailors’ kin declined to join in a national day of mourning yesterday, demanding that the bodies of their sons and husbands be retrieved from the sea floor first.

Their bitter stance underlined widespread criticism of the Government’s slow and confused response to the August 12 sinking of the Kursk. Much of the criticism has centered on Putin, who remained on vacation during the first days of the crisis and made his first public statement on the Kursk four days after it sank.

Putin yesterday said he felt responsible and guilty in the disaster.

Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev and Navy Chief Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov submitted their resignations over the loss of the Kursk, one of Russia’s most advanced submarines, but Putin said he would not accept them. Seeking scapegoats, he said, would be "the most mistaken response."

"I take a full sense of responsibility and sense of blame for this tragedy," he said in an interview with Russia’s RTR television.

Many observers expected Putin to respond by firing top brass - as his predecessor Boris Yeltsin had often done.

In a country where a history of authoritarianism runs deep, Putin’s comments demonstrated an unusual sensitivity to public opinion and eagerness to regain the nation’s confidence.

Putin’s interview came a day after he sat through a harrowing three-hour meeting with the sailors’ families at the submarine’s home base of Vidyayevo.

"The conversation was very heartfelt. He admitted his guilt and inactivity, and he said the main thing is a lack of funds," said Oksana Dudko, whose husband Sergei was the ship’s Deputy Commander.

Speaking firmly and somberly in the television interview, Putin defended his initial silence and the slow response to foreign offers of rescue help, saying the navy acted as quickly as it could given how little was known about the submarine’s condition.

He also promised to restore the honour of the beleaguered military and the nation.

"It grieves me, the theory lately that together with the Kursk the honor of the navy also drowned, the honour of Russia," Putin said. "Our country has survived a lot."

"We will overcome it all and restore it all, the military and the navy and the state," he said.

The nation lowered flags to half staff and prayed in Orthodox churches yesterday. (AP)

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